Professor Hymie Gordon was a graduate of the University of Cape Town who became an internationally renowned medical geneticist. He was the first Professor of Medical Genetics at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, and established the Department there. He was a man with many interests and was also a medical historian of note.

Hymie Gordon was born in Mowbray, Cape Province, South Africa, the son of a Jewish rabbi. He studied medicine at the University of Cape Town and was awarded a degree as doctor of medicine in 1958. He served as resident medical officer in Natal and Durban before going to Groote Schuur Hospital as senior medical registrar. Between 1956 and 1959 he was a fellow at the department of cardiology at the Royal Postgraduate Medical School and the Hammersmith Hospital. In the two subsequent years he worked as an assistant physician in medicine and instructor in biostatistics at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in the USA. On returning to South Africa in 1961 he became a senior lecturer in the department of medicine at the University of Cape Town and senior physician in the Groote Schuur Hospital. Among other duties he established a comprehensive care clinic and a genetics teaching and research programme at the University of Cape Town. In May 1969 he returned to the United States, joining the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota as a member of the division of community medicine and establishing the department of medical genetics. He later became the first chair of the department in 1972 and was appointed professor of medical genetics in 1974.